What might be the subject of Long View Under Scrutiny? For Hong Kong-based artist Lam Tung-pang, it is a whimsical landscape crossing over time and proximity, filled with found images and objects on plywood with Lam’s own painting. His work is poetic, humorous, allegorical, and full of surprises.

Developed as an extension of the Diorama series presented by Hanart TZ Gallery in 2010, Long View Under Scrutiny, opening at Hanart Square on 14 October 2011, exhibits new work that continues Lam’s contemplation of self and environment. By investigating an acquired perception of memory in comparison to reality, Lam placed one of his most personal and iconic works, Fold (2006; London), created while he sojourned in London five years ago, alongside with his most recent creations, including The Youngest and the Oldest (2011, Hong Kong), a work on five-panel plywood completed in his Fo Tan Studio. Such juxtaposition depicts an arch of the artist’s versatility and imagination, to manifest within and beyond himself to the society and its cultural context. The most intriguing aspect is to witness how Lam illustrated this sense of identity through a conscious turn of mind and direction. The Youngest and the Oldest represents a harmonic disjunction in form and substance that mapped his anxiety of the present. Lam’s transformed from a conceptual artist to a cultural translator, which visualizes today’s Hong Kong in a post-1997 and pre-2047 era.

2011 marks the ten years anniversary of Lam’s professional artist career. He left for London to pursue a master’s degree in 2003. When he returned to Hong Kong in 2007 and set up a temporary studio in Beijing upon his return, it had been exactly ten years since the handover. In the vacuum of its cultural identity between two eras, Hong Kong inevitably finds itself at both the birth and the loss of its own voice. This shifting is evident in Long View Under Scrutiny. For Lam, the four years he spent in London, along with a short-lived Beijing studio, enticed him to confront the cultural dislocation and the resulting angst. The chronicle layout provides an insight to Lam’s consciousness, as well as what invoked and redirected his later work on the choice of cultural context and use of object, form, and material.

The changing cultural multiplicity is also metaphorically reflected through Lam’s work on plywood, solid within, but retaining breathing room to look from afar. When closely examining Lam’s work and learning about his process, one has to wonder how he manages to synchronize all the different components. Whether it is the magazine cutouts, or the image transfer from the antique painting, or the little sculpture-like toy models, they are taken out of their initial context but intertwine organically in Lam’s work like a visual poetry. What used to be independently unrelated to each other now breathes in one ecosystem with an underlined order. Regardless of how they differ from each other in time, form, and origin, they translate a coherent spirit of freedom and openness. Again, this is probably what Lam wants to communicate the most: an invitation to play in his re-imagined ideal landscape, pieced together by different memories, some borrowed, some lived, and some re-created. As he tries to converse with the self he sees in the society, he still remains the ultimate seer, observing and creating at the same time.

His thinking becomes the reality of the world––the imaginative world in the best of times.

Extracts from Best of Time by Abby Chen San Mateo, 6th September 2011

Abby Chen is a curator, writer, and art administrator based in San Francisco. She is currently the Curator and Deputy Director at the Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco, overseeing its exhibition and public art program.